Matchmaker Pool Feedback Thread

1v1 mapgen week is back, that is really cool, thanks

@lord_greg

Asymmetry is usually appreciated in maps, because it makes the gameplay less stale. Depending on your rating, you play on maps with a set amount of "slots". They are usually 10+ in total..

I'm not happy how teams can preset themselves in a manner that allows "new" accounts to lock with a "high" account and go into team games. It brings the higher rated player into matches against players they normally wouldn't be setup against. Inevitably the "new" accounts DO NOT play at the level that they are supposedly at either. So it makes for a very one-sided match as the normal account/ranks just get steamrolled by the vastly superior high ranked player and the suspiciously good low ranked accounts.

It's not fair, it's not fun and it very much smacks of rank manipulation. This isn't just randoms doing it either- spikeynoob has done it repeatedly as well as a number of other high profile players. It makes it so that I don't want to play in the ladder because i know some ultra pro is going to just stomp my entire team without thinking while i'm barely able to perform basic functions in the game as it is.

Would be nice if you were capped, yes. Would also be nice if it actually applied to custom games too. Games with ridiculous rating disparity are just terrible data for the system and half the reason you have completely unintelligible ratings across the various “ecosystems” in custom games.

Classic SpikeyNoob

Feedback:
I'd like to see some mapgen maps at the lower ELO ratings.

As a brand-new player, getting a map that nobody has played before feels refreshingly 'fair'. It seems odd that they are limited to the highest skills, given that they level the playing field for players that haven't learned maps by heart.

And another thing - I don't like 'non-standard' maps being in the map pool. I had a cry on discord about williamson's bridge and its complete lack of 'going around defense'.
I can see the idea behind picking it for the low-rating players - 'easy to defend for new players'... But I think it results in teaching the wrong lessons to new players. Not to mention it being a bad map to play (imo).

Just my tuppence, of course. But this is a feedback thread!

Just a reminder that these low rated players who have maps learned by heart, still are low rated. That means, even with their superior map knowledge, they still are unable to climb the ratings. That means that, if you're equally rated, you should be equally matched, just with each player more skilled in other aspects of the game (goes for all skill levels really)

Also, williamson's bridge is not a defensive map. it's notorious for players destroying eachother's bases resulting in a base trade, even. if your opponent builds point defense you get the map for free, build more tanks, and roll over their base

besides all that, i understand the want for mapgen

@waffelznoob said in Matchmaker Pool Feedback Thread:

Just a reminder that these low rated players who have maps learned by heart, still are low rated

And low-rated players that do NOT have maps learned by heart, are also low rated. I'm not sure how this is significant?

Thanks tons for the reply btw.
I've lost a bunch of games from not knowing map-specific 'tricks'. Like huge reclaim fields in certain spots, or edge-building (cliffs) to allow expansions without transport craft.
While much of this is a learning curve, the idea that new players should be extra-vulnerable to 'I don't know this map' losses seems odd to me.

I can understand it in most games, of course. But in a game with auto-generated maps in the ladder pool (which is absolutely AWESOME!), I can't see why the feature is reserved for high ELO.
It's great for veterans, sure, but it's great for new players, too! For aforementioned reasons, as well as variety, and testing a player's ability to adapt to new situations quickly.

I just think random maps sound awesome, and it sounds like they should be bestowed on new players, too. (I can't think of a reason not to, and can even think of a few reasons that it is extra-important!)

If you couldn't find the huge reclaim field in a premade map, you wouldn't find it in map gen either. That's just knowing ctrl+shift is important in looking at a map when you spawn in and are unfamiliar with it.

Edgebuild is still kinda fair (as a complaint) just because the build range circles for units is still not integrated into base game iirc so someone with the ui mods to press shift and see if their engineer/acu can reach on top of a cliff is going to have that competitive advantage. But that's still something you can find out before fully playing a map the first time. Assuming you do have that ui mod, anyway.

The logic of building up to map gen is that lower skill brackets need to "learn the lessons" of some maps in a more controlled environment. This map style forces X or makes Y more optimal because of Z or W reasons. Map gen has so many externalities that it just increases the noise and therefore the pains of learning said lessons because you can't actually isolate certain things in a map as causing certain interactions.

@ftxcommando your suggestion do disallow big rating spreads is crazy. Imagine you manage to convince a friend to try this game only to then be denied the option of playing with them. Are faf promotional efforts that good at attracting new players that you're ready to sacrifice this basic human interaction just to have ratings converge a bit faster? How are you gonna justify banning smurf accounts after you make that the only way of playing alongside your beginner friend?

If a change to tmm is really warranted because of this problem, my vote is for configuring the matchmaker such that it tries to find a similarly structured opposing team, rather than what you suggest. If a 1500 + 1500 + 100 premade is in queue, it's ok to match them vs 1400 + 1400 + 300. TMM is unavailable half the time simply because not enough players are searching for a game, any further restrictions on team compositions would only make that worse, and for bigger games, your proposal constitutes a harsher restriction than mine. But there's a delicate balance between wait times and match quality that needs to be struck, and if the scales are tipped too far towards the latter, people stop queueing because of the wait times, compounding the issue, so I'm not convinced the problem justifies the cost.

As for custom lobbies, in addition to the argument above about friends playing together, there's the fact that for many noobs, astro lobbies are the only option. No matter how much we wished it wasn't the case, if a noob hosts any other map, their lobby won't fill unless the title is "all welcome". This is because other new players rarely get in the mood to try something else. When they do, the friction imposed on them should be minimal.

Custom games can be reasonably well balanced if 2 noobs join, especially if the map layout allows the host to put them against each other, and it's far preferable to hoping a noob is willing to try hosting, and they're in the mood to pick a map they never played before, AND 7 other noobs decide to join. Not gonna happen until the nr of players online is an order of magnitude higher.

Besides, since when is global rating such a treasure to cherish when It can be gamed so easily? Why put up such outrageous barriers to play just to protect this flawed system from a bit of variance, when it's been the general guiding principle of faf development for some time to steer players towards ladder/TMM and league standings anyway?

Tbf mapgens tend to be simpler than designed maps, so they may indeed be well suited for low rating players (i'm mainly thinking the 7.5km size for low rating 1v1 ladder).

Mapgens are very well suited for low rated games. They are way less intimidating. The simple fact of the matter is that new players have repeatedly expressed their discomfort with having to learn maps as well as game mechanics at the same time, and even though sometimes they communicate that discomfort poorly, no amount of quibbling over what "build orders" actually are is gonna make their reluctance go away. If the goal is to get noobs to play ladder instead of custom games, they should be included more for that reason alone.

I'm not sure teaching players specific game mechanics should be the main goal with ladder map composition. Even though we call it ladder, the vast majority of people actually stop climbing it as soon as the rating system zeroes in on their skill level, and it should primarily be fun to play at your given level as opposed to a challenge to learn boat or transport micro or whatever, at least in my opinion.

Maybe once ladder/tmm games become prevalent, the focus could shift, but for now, my understanding is that custom lobbies still dominate.

@sylph_ said in Matchmaker Pool Feedback Thread:

@waffelznoob said in Matchmaker Pool Feedback Thread:

Just a reminder that these low rated players who have maps learned by heart, still are low rated

And low-rated players that do NOT have maps learned by heart, are also low rated. I'm not sure how this is significant?

They are low rated despite having an advantage in map knowledge. Assuming you are equally rated, that means they must have a disadvantage elsewhere, or else you wouldn't be equally rated

I also personally thought learning maps was fun. It is the one thing you see improvement the fastest in. Make a huge mistake in your BO on theta passage? Ok, try something else next time
Make a huge mistake in your mapgen BO? Too bad, you're getting an entirely new map next game and you'll make the exact same (or some other) mistake

This extends past build orders into general gameplay, too

@phong Hmm, yeah, disallowing/punishing high rating spreads for people queuing together does sound like a bad idea.

It's partially a problem of low player sizes and partially a problem of the ranking system having to rate many different setups with the same number.

Two 1.5ks do not play the same as one 2k and one 1k afterall.

For custom games this is less of a problem because the rating is way less meaningful for one, but also because you can see all players in your game before the game starts.

For tmm I think the best way is to further punish high rating spreads in the search algorithm and to maybe find a way to make the queuing with a lower rated player uneccesary for high rated players.

Maybe once you hit like 1.8k you get a counter on your matchmaker tab showing you how many players of your rating bracket are currently queuing/in a game to avoid the frustration of queuing for 30 min in a full queue w/o finding a game? Dunno

@cheeseberry I think the problem is that people have too high expectations of the matchmaking system, not realizing how crippling the small player pool is to any such system. We can't afford to have perfect matchups when half the time there are 0 people in queue.

The league system is exactly what was needed but I think development of it stopped at a critical point. If those shiny badges replaced rating numbers everywhere in the faf UI, lobby, scoreboard etc, then they might actually become desirable, and we'd finally stop referring to people as "the 1500" like they're wearing prison jumpsuits.

If the devs could count on queues containing hundreds rather than a handful of players, the matching algorithm could easily be tweaked to address all these issues.

@waffelznoob I think learning new maps can be fun, but I also can see how, a new player especially, struggling with the basic game mechanics, might want to postpone or minimize engagement with specific maps. It's a perfectly natural instinct to focus on skills that generalize, and since the game has such a steep learning curve, mechanics naturally rank higher than map-specific knowledge. New players feel inexperienced compared to their ladder competitors, even if they know nothing about them or their familiarity with bespoke maps. This is why the perception of a level playing field can make ladder more attractive even if it's based on an unjustified lack of confidence.

There wouldn't be an "if" I would just not allow those teams to form by automatchmaker nor be a premade.

@ftxcommando if no one gives a shit about new players we'll all run out of people to play with sooner rather than later. You're short-sighted.

Nothing quite like that new player experience of being used as a slave to farm 500 rating because rating systems falter at large variances and giving this 300 trueskill player 900 rating which will now take 3 times as long for him to reach his actual rating due to the impact of sigma.

Thanks for your long term strategic vision.

Your buddy somehow managed to convince you to install this old-as-balls game but you can't play with your friend because you're too new and some asshole decided that's problematic for some reason. do you A: grind alone until you reach their level or B: open your steam library and play something else?

Fuck rating, it's never gonna be perfect. Fun is more important. It's a game.

Also your proposed solution to the problem is shit when it doesn't need to be.